A goofy, laughable and, above all, smelly codfish that sustainable fishing campaigners hoped would get the world seriously concerned about shrinking stocks of seafood is no more.

Stinky Fish, star of a campaign launched last month by the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) and the Marine Stewardship Council, has been tossed straight back into the ocean following a furious reaction from the fishing industry.

Stinky Fish's short but spectacular career as an internet campaigner is now confined to obscure corners of Facebook and YouTube, where videos still linger of the blue-green hand puppet trying to wake up a pile of dead crabs: 'C'mon guys, this is no time to rest - we've got a seafood crisis!', and lecturing chip shop customers - 'What part of extinction don't they understand?'

'I seem to have stirred up quite a stink!' says Stinky Fish on the revised WWF website yesterday. 'Why don't you help smarten me up?'

According to one WWF source, if Stinky is reborn it may be without the smell, as 'Super Fish'. 'Which doesn't quite have the same ring to it.'

Stinky's name was his biggest problem. 'The one thing you don't do when marketing fish is talk about smell or slime. Consumers are nervous of fish, and one of the major issues is odour,' said Jim Gilmore, a Washington-based lobbyist who represents much of the Alaskan pollack fishery. Tesco's Peter Hajipieris, group policy manager for seafood, personally rang the Marine Stewardship Council's chief executive, Rupert Howes, to tell him to pull the campaign. He told The Observer that the Stinky Fish campaign was 'misguided and unfortunate: it damages the industry'.

Mike Parker, deputy chief executive of Young's Seafood, owner of Findus, said: 'There is a lot of irritation about Stinky Fish - clearly it's not what we want to say.' He was not aware of the campaign before the launch. But he reserved his chief complaints for the WWF, with which Young's has worked for some years on schemes to reduce fishing 'by-catch' and introduce more environmentally friendly trawling gear.

The Marine Stewardship Council, a UK-based international body that awards blue ticks to fish products it deems sustainable, has removed all references to the campaign, which it enthusiastically endorsed at its launch.

It has issued profuse apologies to Tesco, Young's, Findus and fishing companies which spend hundreds of thousands of pounds to acquire its certification every year.

'This just shows what trouble campaigning bodies get into when they get too friendly with industry,' said one senior WWF official, exasperated at the failure of the campaign and the distraction from the serious problem of tackling endangered fish stocks. 'We didn't anticipate the negative reaction,' said Howes. He admits that Stinky was a big mistake. 'In hindsight, I do have sympathy with the industry - the campaign belittled the industry.'

John Fiorillo, who edits Intrafish.com, an influential online bulletin for the fishing industry, said 'Stinkygate' showed that environmental bodies still had much to learn about the global fishing business. 'It seems really odd that the WWF and the marine council never asked one of their partners in the seafood industry to review Stinky first,' Fiorillo said.